The thing is, there's actually a really clear way to tell the difference between a cheater and someone who studied their butt off to get a better grade: A quick oral examination (no jokes, please, this is serious). It doesn't have to be that extensive, just a few questions about the material on the spot to see if the students knows what the hell they're talking about. For graduate level work, oral defenses of masters and doctoral theses are normal, and there's no real reason not to employ them in cases of accusations of cheating.
There's no need for Wikileaks to publish it - it's no secret that it was PFC Bradley Manning, who's been held in a military prison without trial for the last 7 months under conditions that the UN is investigating as possible torture.
Wikileaks has not released 97% of the diplomatic cables they currently have access to, and have redacted a great deal to prevent exposure of legitimate secrets like troop movements and identities of spies. That means that (a) not all of it was leaked initially, (b) portions of it may be held back for years because they would harm legitimate US national security interests, and (c) that the purposes of the leaks were to show exactly what lies the US and other governments have been telling the public, particularly in relation to the "war on terror". I don't blame you for getting that fact wrong though: Many US officials from both major parties have repeatedly stated that Wikileaks dumped all the information all at once, when in fact nothing of that sort has happened.
And notice the subtle detail: he never said they never existed, and only claimed that no one could prove they existed.
This is one of the classic versions of what Carl Bernstein described as the "non-denial denial": You don't actually say it's untrue, you just say that the intrepid reporter can't prove anything.
The thing is, reporters that refuse to divulge information to protect the rich and powerful often win their cases and successfully protect the rich and powerful. For instance, Judith Miller, who by all appearances was trying to protect somebody in the vice-president's office (possibly Scooter Libby, possibly somebody else that Libby took the fall for).
So it's safe to say that Hansen is trying to protect somebody, and using this as a lame excuse.
But if you look at the history of government in the US, it has been pretty uniformly in the direction of bigger and more expensive,...
Actually, that depends on how you measure. For instance, if you go with absolute number of dollars, it will definitely appear like there's an average 2% increase each year, but that's because of inflation. If you look at percentage of GDP, you'll see fluctuations that reflect the fact that GDP drops during recessions. If you look at inflation-adjusted dollars, you'll get a slightly different picture.
In short, when it comes to government budgets, the numbers are awful.
Windows is still used on desktops and laptops but look around you and everything runs ^nix
The thing that OSS contributed, though, was that the ^nix that was being run on all these things was freely distributed and pulling in the best ideas from every person or organization willing to contribute, rather than some devices running AIX with all the stuff IBM's engineers had thought of, while some other devices were running Solaris with all the stuff Sun's engineers had thought of, while still others were running SCO Unix with all the stuff old-school SCO had thought of, etc.
You really think that once the government starts to regulate the internet, that it won't stick its hand into what is "fair" or not on the internet.
That makes about as much sense as "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" because the Internet was created by the government and has been regulated by the government since before Al Gore got the funding to thoroughly expand ARPANet and open it up to the general public.
As a liberal, I can play this argument too: It starts with short-term tax cuts to stimulate spending after a recession. Then later on the short-term has become a decade and then permanent. And the cuts go deeper, and deeper. Then comes a deficit commission and Social Security and unemployment insurance is gone and you have a significant population of desperate unemployed people starving to death on the streets.
The trouble with the "work incrementally" line of reasoning is that it can be used to shut down any real evaluation of perfectly reasonable proposals solely because they come from the 'other' side. Once that short-circuiting is completed, you're halfway from turning somebody from a reasoning adult to a partisan moron. (The other half is convincing the potential partisan that they should support anything their leaders propose because it's necessary to achieve ultimate victory for their side where all their dreams can be realized.)
In this case, though, the pattern (seen here on/. as well as from Rush et al) is that the right wing set up a straw man of what net neutrality it is in order to knock it down. Specifically, they claimed that the proposal was about something similar to the Fairness Doctrine, when it is fact completely different.
It was rather clever of them, really: They took the fact that "Neutrality" and "Fairness" were similar ideas, and used just that to make a large segment of the population think that what "Net Neutrality" meant was "Barack Obama ensuring that nobody can say anything bad about him on the Internet".
They fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The best known is "never get involved in a land war in Asia", but only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against 4chan when LOL's are on the line!"
Here's the problem: we remember the success of dropouts like Gates and Zuckerberg, and forget that for each Zuckerberg there are hundreds of dropouts that are desperately seeking jobs at Burger King. And finishing college isn't necessarily a barrier to innovation: Larry and Sergei both finished their undergraduate degrees, and things turned out just fine for them.
I thought that Robot Chicken had established a long time ago that we'd replaced the color coded terrorism alert system with one that uses rubber duckies.
First off, AT&T and other telecoms are larger campaign contributors than Google, Apple et al, so this is pretty much a done deal, will of the people be damned.
Secondly, all corporate players generally recognize that a net neutral Internet could become potentially democratic (small d intentional here), which is not in their best interest. They'd much rather the Internet be a somewhat more interactive broadcast medium like television than they would have it be a truly horizontal distributed network, because the more broadcast-like it is the easier it is to control what is said or heard on it, and the harder it is to compete with established players.
Thirdly, most Republicans and Democrats could accurately be described as pro-corporate.
In the United States, a defendant has a Constitutional right to confront all the evidence against him. Any evidence the jury gathers from any place other than the trial proceedings or the judge is not something the defendant has had the opportunity to examine and contest. Hence it is inadmissable.
Can we not have a "normal people's congress" on the internet or something?
No, we can't. As we should well know, when it comes to Internet voting, the whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
And even more so with politics, where big bucks are at stake and evil bastards trying to snag as much of that cash as possible through possibly illegitimate means. For instance, a corporate employer could require that their employees log a vote for the position that the corporation wants from a company computer (so they can intercept and verify it) as a condition for continued employment. So now that gives the board of that corporation 5000 votes instead of the 10 they should have, because most employees aren't willing to lose their livelihoods on a principle.
My take on this: Debian is much more tied to the FSF philosophy than most of the other distros. That's their way of doing things. That means that the baseline distribution needs to be Free Software.
I see two major points of this kind of effort: 1. We get to see how functional entirely Free systems really are. Maybe you don't need the latest and greatest nVidia drivers to still have a machine that does what you need it to do. 2. In an absolutely Free Software world, the binary blobs and the like were stopgap measures at best. This could potentially motivate people to make Free replacements.
Now, both of these assume that you have the goal of running entirely Free Software. But if you have that goal, then this is completely logical and worthwhile.
Something tells me you didn't actually follow the link before making the claim that it's "someone else's oversimplification", because the linked article starts:
The Laffer Curve: Past, Present, and Future Published on June 1, 2004 by Arthur Laffer
And the author bio at the bottom reads:
Arthur B. Laffer is the founder and chairman of Laffer Associates, an economic research and consulting firm. This paper was written and originally published by Laffer Associates.
I mean, GP claimed I had put words in Arthur Laffer's mouth. I provided a direct link to Arthur Laffer writing exactly what I said he wrote. What more do you need?
Well, see, this is where you and I differ. I'm more concerned about accuracy than presentation. The Economist has always been along the lines of "Just the facts", with in-depth well-written articles focused on economic issues but occasionally making forays into political issues. They do a ton of fact-checking, and as a result have a lot of credibility.
Besides the many other good suggestions, I'd highly recommend Salon, and Glenn Greenwald in particular. You might also try The Nation, although it can stray into bleeding-heart territory at times.
You can also learn a heck of a lot by reading foreign news media, such as the BBC or Al Jazeera.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, there's actually a really clear way to tell the difference between a cheater and someone who studied their butt off to get a better grade: A quick oral examination (no jokes, please, this is serious). It doesn't have to be that extensive, just a few questions about the material on the spot to see if the students knows what the hell they're talking about. For graduate level work, oral defenses of masters and doctoral theses are normal, and there's no real reason not to employ them in cases of accusations of cheating.
There's no need for Wikileaks to publish it - it's no secret that it was PFC Bradley Manning, who's been held in a military prison without trial for the last 7 months under conditions that the UN is investigating as possible torture.
Wikileaks has not released 97% of the diplomatic cables they currently have access to, and have redacted a great deal to prevent exposure of legitimate secrets like troop movements and identities of spies. That means that (a) not all of it was leaked initially, (b) portions of it may be held back for years because they would harm legitimate US national security interests, and (c) that the purposes of the leaks were to show exactly what lies the US and other governments have been telling the public, particularly in relation to the "war on terror". I don't blame you for getting that fact wrong though: Many US officials from both major parties have repeatedly stated that Wikileaks dumped all the information all at once, when in fact nothing of that sort has happened.
And notice the subtle detail: he never said they never existed, and only claimed that no one could prove they existed.
This is one of the classic versions of what Carl Bernstein described as the "non-denial denial": You don't actually say it's untrue, you just say that the intrepid reporter can't prove anything.
The thing is, reporters that refuse to divulge information to protect the rich and powerful often win their cases and successfully protect the rich and powerful. For instance, Judith Miller, who by all appearances was trying to protect somebody in the vice-president's office (possibly Scooter Libby, possibly somebody else that Libby took the fall for).
So it's safe to say that Hansen is trying to protect somebody, and using this as a lame excuse.
But if you look at the history of government in the US, it has been pretty uniformly in the direction of bigger and more expensive, ...
Actually, that depends on how you measure. For instance, if you go with absolute number of dollars, it will definitely appear like there's an average 2% increase each year, but that's because of inflation. If you look at percentage of GDP, you'll see fluctuations that reflect the fact that GDP drops during recessions. If you look at inflation-adjusted dollars, you'll get a slightly different picture.
In short, when it comes to government budgets, the numbers are awful.
Windows is still used on desktops and laptops but look around you and everything runs ^nix
The thing that OSS contributed, though, was that the ^nix that was being run on all these things was freely distributed and pulling in the best ideas from every person or organization willing to contribute, rather than some devices running AIX with all the stuff IBM's engineers had thought of, while some other devices were running Solaris with all the stuff Sun's engineers had thought of, while still others were running SCO Unix with all the stuff old-school SCO had thought of, etc.
You really think that once the government starts to regulate the internet, that it won't stick its hand into what is "fair" or not on the internet.
That makes about as much sense as "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" because the Internet was created by the government and has been regulated by the government since before Al Gore got the funding to thoroughly expand ARPANet and open it up to the general public.
Double Godwin! You both lose.
Liberals usually work incrementally.
As a liberal, I can play this argument too: It starts with short-term tax cuts to stimulate spending after a recession. Then later on the short-term has become a decade and then permanent. And the cuts go deeper, and deeper. Then comes a deficit commission and Social Security and unemployment insurance is gone and you have a significant population of desperate unemployed people starving to death on the streets.
The trouble with the "work incrementally" line of reasoning is that it can be used to shut down any real evaluation of perfectly reasonable proposals solely because they come from the 'other' side. Once that short-circuiting is completed, you're halfway from turning somebody from a reasoning adult to a partisan moron. (The other half is convincing the potential partisan that they should support anything their leaders propose because it's necessary to achieve ultimate victory for their side where all their dreams can be realized.)
In this case, though, the pattern (seen here on /. as well as from Rush et al) is that the right wing set up a straw man of what net neutrality it is in order to knock it down. Specifically, they claimed that the proposal was about something similar to the Fairness Doctrine, when it is fact completely different.
It was rather clever of them, really: They took the fact that "Neutrality" and "Fairness" were similar ideas, and used just that to make a large segment of the population think that what "Net Neutrality" meant was "Barack Obama ensuring that nobody can say anything bad about him on the Internet".
They fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The best known is "never get involved in a land war in Asia", but only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against 4chan when LOL's are on the line!"
I just want to tell you both good luck, we're all counting on you.
develop drugs that can cross the BBB
Man, I wouldn't even try to cross the Better Business Bureau, those guys can be mean!
Here's the problem: we remember the success of dropouts like Gates and Zuckerberg, and forget that for each Zuckerberg there are hundreds of dropouts that are desperately seeking jobs at Burger King. And finishing college isn't necessarily a barrier to innovation: Larry and Sergei both finished their undergraduate degrees, and things turned out just fine for them.
I thought that Robot Chicken had established a long time ago that we'd replaced the color coded terrorism alert system with one that uses rubber duckies.
Yes and no.
First off, AT&T and other telecoms are larger campaign contributors than Google, Apple et al, so this is pretty much a done deal, will of the people be damned.
Secondly, all corporate players generally recognize that a net neutral Internet could become potentially democratic (small d intentional here), which is not in their best interest. They'd much rather the Internet be a somewhat more interactive broadcast medium like television than they would have it be a truly horizontal distributed network, because the more broadcast-like it is the easier it is to control what is said or heard on it, and the harder it is to compete with established players.
Thirdly, most Republicans and Democrats could accurately be described as pro-corporate.
The other thing that a lot of people misinterpret is that a mistrial is not an acquittal. The defendant can be retried for his crimes.
It's actually more than that.
In the United States, a defendant has a Constitutional right to confront all the evidence against him. Any evidence the jury gathers from any place other than the trial proceedings or the judge is not something the defendant has had the opportunity to examine and contest. Hence it is inadmissable.
Can we not have a "normal people's congress" on the internet or something?
No, we can't. As we should well know, when it comes to Internet voting, the whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
And even more so with politics, where big bucks are at stake and evil bastards trying to snag as much of that cash as possible through possibly illegitimate means. For instance, a corporate employer could require that their employees log a vote for the position that the corporation wants from a company computer (so they can intercept and verify it) as a condition for continued employment. So now that gives the board of that corporation 5000 votes instead of the 10 they should have, because most employees aren't willing to lose their livelihoods on a principle.
My take on this: Debian is much more tied to the FSF philosophy than most of the other distros. That's their way of doing things. That means that the baseline distribution needs to be Free Software.
I see two major points of this kind of effort:
1. We get to see how functional entirely Free systems really are. Maybe you don't need the latest and greatest nVidia drivers to still have a machine that does what you need it to do.
2. In an absolutely Free Software world, the binary blobs and the like were stopgap measures at best. This could potentially motivate people to make Free replacements.
Now, both of these assume that you have the goal of running entirely Free Software. But if you have that goal, then this is completely logical and worthwhile.
Something tells me you didn't actually follow the link before making the claim that it's "someone else's oversimplification", because the linked article starts:
The Laffer Curve: Past, Present, and Future
Published on June 1, 2004 by Arthur Laffer
And the author bio at the bottom reads:
Arthur B. Laffer is the founder and chairman of Laffer Associates, an economic research and consulting firm. This paper was written and originally published by Laffer Associates.
I mean, GP claimed I had put words in Arthur Laffer's mouth. I provided a direct link to Arthur Laffer writing exactly what I said he wrote. What more do you need?
Fox News has a better presentation.
Well, see, this is where you and I differ. I'm more concerned about accuracy than presentation. The Economist has always been along the lines of "Just the facts", with in-depth well-written articles focused on economic issues but occasionally making forays into political issues. They do a ton of fact-checking, and as a result have a lot of credibility.
Besides the many other good suggestions, I'd highly recommend Salon, and Glenn Greenwald in particular. You might also try The Nation, although it can stray into bleeding-heart territory at times.
You can also learn a heck of a lot by reading foreign news media, such as the BBC or Al Jazeera.
Yes, he kinda did:
The Laffer Curve: Past, Present, and Future, by Arthur Laffer.